Natural Gas
Wyoming is second in the nation in natural gas production and seventh in oil production. Natural gas and oil deposits are distributed widely throughout much of the state, with the majority of the production in recent years focused in the southwest part of the state. The Powder River Basin with its coalbed methane deposits has also seen a great deal of development. Large areas of the state have already been leased for oil and gas development; including much of the southwest and northeastern quarters.
A number of large gas fields are prominent in Wyoming. The Pinedale Anticline and Jonah fields near Pinedale cover 228,000 acres and are currently estimated to contain 25 trillion and 14 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, respectively. Several other very large natural gas fields are under development in southwest Wyoming, including the Continental Divide-Creston, Hiawatha, Moxa Arch, Normally Pressured Lance, Moneta Divide, and LaBarge Platform fields. Recent improvements in technology have allowed increased use of directional drilling coupled with hydraulic fracturing, which is making oil and natural gas deposits in the Niobrara shale in southeast Wyoming accessible. That said, of the 11,616,908 acres of federal leases in Wyoming in fiscal year 2011 only 33 percent contained producing leases and of the 1,660 applications for permits to drill the Bureau of Land Management issued in fiscal year 2011, about 63 percent were actually drilled.